Extrasensory - The Prophet | 1

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

In 1950s England, milkman John Pollock makes an astonishing prediction about his dead daughters. John’s wife Florence thinks he’s crazy—until she gives birth to twins. John vows to convince the world that reincarnation is real. Extrasensory is an Apple Original podcast produced by Blanchard House. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.apple.co/Extrasensory

Where to start? Because there's a lot of ways to tell this story. A lot that's weird, dark, freaky. A lot that just, well, doesn't add up. Do we start with the premonition? Or the strange birthmarks? Or maybe we just cut straight to the accident the event that sets everything in motion I mean that's probably where John would start it

because everything in this story comes back to John and I think if you understand him then you understand the story that's Lauren I'll tell you more about her in a bit. But for now, let's just say this is her story too. Okay. John was a milkman. He delivered milk. But he wasn't just any old milkman. John was a milkman who really knew how to tell a story.

And this story, well, I mean, it is phenomenal. Every time I tell somebody, it's like their faces are like gasping and they're just, you know, mouth wide open and like, oh my gosh. So let's start the story how John might start it. John's version of events and see how it goes. There are plenty of other versions, but, you know, all in good time. Now, it begins as a tragedy. And, of course, it remains a tragedy. But then it becomes something else. Thankfully, at the end of this, there's hope in there.

It holds something hopeful. So, bear with us. It happens on a Sunday. We're talking about May 5th, 1957 in Hexham, a market town in the north of England. And in the 50s, basically nothing happens on Sundays. Apart from this Sunday, that is. So, John was married to Florence

and they've got four boys and two girls at this point in their life. Joanna's about 11 and Jacqueline's 6. They're, yeah, very sweet, cute girls with brown hair, big smiles. They spend almost all of their time together, even though they're quite different in age. It's just after 9am, a gorgeous spring day. John's out with his boys delivering milk. His two girls, Joanna and Jacqueline,

are walking along the road hand in hand. And their nine-year-old friend, Tony, is with them. They used to go to church every Sunday. The road is really quiet and that's when it happens. Maybe they hear it coming. Maybe they're just too busy chatting and singing. But behind them, a green car on the wrong side of the road mounts the footpath

and heads towards the three kids. There can be no other outcome. The car is going too fast. The collision is too direct. The children are all killed. The accident is unimaginable. It's horrific. It's the worst thing that can possibly happen to a family.

Thy dead men shall live. Together with my dead body shall they arise. Of course, Hexham goes into mourning. The sense of loss is deep, very deep. Three children on their way to church, taken. But there's a twist. One man recovers from his grief in short order. Surprisingly short order.

Before long, he feels no sorrow, no pain. And he lays no flowers at the little girl's grave. And that man is John. John Pollock. Their father. Because John Pollock becomes convinced that his daughters aren't dead. Utterly convinced. And he is certain that he'll see them again.

Not in the afterlife, but right here on Earth. That they'll come back. It's kind of extraordinary, but he really meant it. He really believed that they were coming back to life. And before long, he'll show the world evidence, hard evidence, that it's true, that his little girls have been reborn. Before long, John Pollock isn't mourning, isn't grieving. He's celebrating. This is Extrasensory,

an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House. I'm Will Sharp. Episode 1, The Prophet. OK, time to introduce you to Lauren. She's 37 and a self-confessed beach girl. She lives on the south coast of England and keeps a surfboard in her living room. And she's spiritual. Because I've lost people in my family, I feel them around me all the time. And there's moments where I just can't explain things and I'll feel them or see them or something will happen that's unexplainable.

And I know that it's their spirit. So here's her connection to this story. Let's go back to when she's 13 and she's at an all-girls school. We wore kilts so it's quite fancy. Yeah kilts, they wore kilts. So Lauren's in her kilt and a navy school sweater. It's a rainy Tuesday morning, religious studies class which is generally seen in most British schools as a DOS as we say, i.e. the least important subject when you can just sort of lark about. Anyway, just like all the other kids, Lauren is slouched over her desk.

Her teacher is a short woman with short hair. She was nice. She was a bit stern. The nice but stern teacher says that for this class, the kids are going to learn about reincarnation. But there's a massive plus. They're going to learn about it from a VHS. And obviously everyone's like, woohoo! We're not looking at textbooks, we're looking at TV. This is great.

Picture the scene. A massive old-school TV and video machine is wheeled in. Of course, that's a bonus. But, I mean, this is religious studies, so it's never going to be that interesting, right? Anyway, Lauren is sitting there. The teacher's telling people off for chatting in the back row, like the lessons are DOS, remember? But the VHS flicks on, and Lauren has a shock. This looks like an ordinary family photograph,

but it tells a quite remarkable story. Because on the screen is a photo of a family. And I was like, that's the photograph that we've got on the mantelpiece at home. Two small girls were killed by a car. That's a bit weird. And then this TV show starts to tell the story about two little girls walking to church

it tells the story of the horrible crash that we heard about at the start of the show and the prediction by their father John Pollock that his two daughters would be reborn so here's the reveal turns out that the two daughters would be reborn. So here's the reveal.

Turns out that the two little girls who died are Lauren's aunties, which means that, yes, John Pollock is Lauren's grandfather. And now here, in class on a rainy Tuesday morning, in a class which is supposed to be just, like, a doss, Lauren is hearing about this mad, crazy story that nobody in her family has ever talked about. Lauren wants to know more.

Of course she does. I remember looking to my friends in the class and being like, what the heck is going on? Yeah, I was, like, astounded. She's stumbled upon a family secret. Lauren is bursting to get home to ask her parents about it, but her dad's out at work. I do really remember Mum telling us,

like, kind of rolling her eyes in a way and being like, oh, you know, yeah, your dad never tells us about it. I mean, she sort of brushed it off because I think Dad had brushed it off. So Lauren decides to leave it there. It's just a pretty cool story, spooky story. And everything that she knows is from what she saw on that grainy old VHS in religious studies class.

We were kids, so it was just quite amusing. We weren't asking the right questions at the time. And in any case, her dad's not interested in talking about it. It's all in the past, you know. But now here we are, 24 years later. Lauren's an adult. And she wants to know the full story. The real story.

I just want to know the truth, finally. My whole life I've questioned what actually happened. And I'm, yeah, I'm ready to find out the true story. It's all been just a secret for too long now. So, yeah, I need to know. So I guess the obvious thing would be to ask her parents. But sadly, there's a problem with that in that they've both passed away. And that's where we come in.

Nobody has told the full story of all this before, so we've been tracking people down, digging through all the newspaper cuttings and archives and piecing it all together. We'll be telling the story for the first time, and Lauren is discovering it all in real time, at the same time as us. So, anyway, here we go.

Now, that horrible, tragic crash doesn't just make the local newspapers. It goes national. The next day's papers are full of it. Three children were killed by a car yesterday as they walked hand-in-hand to Mass in the early morning sunshine. The eyewitness said that just before the road accident, the car seemed to wobble and swerved to the wrong side of the road. People came running, but they were too late.

The girls were dead on the pavement, the boy dying in a front garden. I mean, it's devastating. But tracking people down who remember all of this, let's just say it's been tricky. I mean, it was nearly 70 years ago. But producer Poppy, she's persistent and she's done it. And the people who were there could never forget it.

Remember the accident, which was 200 yards away from where we used to live? That's John Coleman. The whole town was shocked by it. I can sort of remember everybody talking about it and how tragic it was, which obviously three children killed at that age. Even now, John can picture Joanna

and Jacqueline. I can remember the two girls playing out in the back lane. We also found Pauline Todd. She went to school with Joanna and Jacqueline and went to the same church. She remembers that day as if it were yesterday. There are May Day celebrations planned, processions.

The nuns used to organise them. Everybody wore white dresses. One of them used to carry a basket, throw the petals out. That morning in 1957, Pauline's already arrived at Mass, the same Mass that Joanna, Jacqueline and Tony are on their way to.

But of course, they will never get there. And news travels fast. We knew more or less straight away because that was half past nine Mass. The whole parish knew by eleven o'clock. That was a terrible time for everybody.

The whole, I mean, you know, the whole school and that seemed to shut down. Some people that we contacted said that it's still too painful. That even all these years later, they just don't want to talk about it. Wednesday, May the 8th, 1957. Just three days after the crash. Seems like the whole town has turned out to pay their respects. The traffic has stopped. 300 children from Jacqueline, Joanna and Tony's school

march down the road towards the church. A hearse pulls up. The tiny coffins of Joanna and Jacqueline are slid out and carried into church by pallbearers. John and Florence Pollock and their four surviving kids follow behind. So too do little Tony's family. It's all just desperately, desperately sad. I can remember we all had a line-up,

and we all had to have school uniform on. And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake. The boy who sat next to Jacqueline at school lays a bunch of roses, and here's an interesting detail. The driver responsible, a Marjorie Wynne, at school, lays a bunch of roses and here's an interesting detail. The driver responsible, a Marjorie Wynne, sends three wreaths of flowers,

one for each coffin. Joanna, Jacqueline and Tony are laid to rest in the quiet, tree-lined churchyard. A small white angel with her wings spread out marks the spot. But of course, that's not the end of the story. Here's John Coleman on how he feels about what plays out afterwards.

Which is very strange, really. It's something that's hard to get your head around. It's very hard to say it's coincidence. But the more you read into it, it could be quite possible, you know? So the whole town's in mourning, but amidst it all, John Pollock does something you never expect a grieving father to do. He makes two predictions which are, well, pretty far out. First, he says that his wife Florence will give birth to identical twins.

He says that his wife Florence will give birth to identical twins. And second, he says that these twins will be the reincarnation of their daughters Jacqueline and Joanna, who they'd just laid to rest. Lauren, understandably, finds this all sort of bananas. That's so cruel, in a way, to your own wife, to be like, come on then, let's have some more babies and let's try some more babies and let's try and bring these girls back to life like i can't oh man yeah you can't even imagine

and indeed florence is not happy about it not happy at all so who is this john pollock what kind of a man are we talking about here kind of a man are we talking about here? Well, yes, as we know, John is a milkman. Now, that doesn't sound like a money spinner, but in the 50s, apparently it is. He's up at the crack of dawn, probably driving an electric delivery van or milk float, as it's affectionately called. And in the 50s, everybody drinks milk and everybody has it delivered. Which means John's not exactly short of cash, some of which he likes to spend on clothes. And I think he sees himself as pretty dapper. He always wears a three-piece suit and a cravat, which is like, you know, one of those fancy silk scarves.

And, just so you can picture him, he has a moustache. John loves his classical music. He spends hours in his study listening to records, drinking scotch late at night, smoking cigarettes or his pipe. He fancies himself as a pretty cultured guy. From what I can make out, he spent a lot of time in that office with his books. I think he's probably saw himself as a bit of an intellectual. He also plays the piano, though sometimes he struggles to reach lower notes because

apparently he trapped the little finger on his left hand in a tank door during the Second World War. He served in the Far East, Malaya. But the precise details of John's war record are all, well, a bit hazy. Now, it seems that John has always been into reincarnation. He first read about it in a novel at the age of nine. But it doesn't exactly square with his religion, because he's a Catholic. And you probably know that pretty much all Christians do not go in for reincarnation. They go in for afterlife. You live, and then you die, and then you go to heaven or you go to hell.

But you're definitely not reborn. But John, well, let's just say that John does things his own way. He prays for evidence of reincarnation, and that's not exactly what good Catholics do. We'll come back to his wife, Florence, because she's a bit harder to figure out. A couple of years younger than him, has her work cut out raising the six kids.

The two girls, of course, and their four boys, Ian, Keith, Bobby and David. From everything we can find out, she seems like a nice lady. Now, when the girls die in that terrible crash, John apparently turns inwards. He sort of retreats, spending longer and longer in his book-lined study, perhaps listening to his music. And it's probably in these late-night sessions,

with a scotch and his pipe that John develops an idea. An idea that grows and grows and grows. It's about the girl's passing. John starts to believe that Joanna and Jacqueline's deaths are God's way of punishing him. Yeah, some of the old newspaper articles say that John saw the accident as basically God's judgment on him for praying for evidence of reincarnation, which of course is totally against what the Catholic Church says you should do, and John had been doing that since he was a kid.

But in spite of all that, John still firmly believes that God will answer his prayers, that God will provide evidence of reincarnation. Not only that, it's John's own daughters who will provide that evidence by being reborn. Now, understandably, none of this goes down well with Florence, who is deeply religious, according to John. Religious in a much more conventional way than her husband. In fact, she's sort of furious. She just wants him to shut up, the silly man. But then, sure enough, one night, lying in bed,

Florence turns to John and tells him that she is pregnant. And that is when John makes his big prediction. He believed in reincarnation and he thought that his daughters were going to come back to him as twins. Yep, as twins. And John just keeps banging on about it. So to make him stop, Florence consults a gynecologist who says, twins? No, that's impossible. There's one heartbeat, one set of limbs, it's one baby. No, that's impossible. There's one heartbeat, one set of limbs, it's one baby. And I mean, the odds of twins are slim.

Very slim. The odds of twin daughters, even slimmer. Plus, there's no history of twins in this family. So that's it, right? End of story. Isn't it? There's something I haven't told you yet, and it's pretty wild. Something that John tells the national newspapers on the very day his little girls died. The accident happens on the Sunday, and in the next day's Daily Herald, on the front page, they print this story about John's 14-year-old son, Ian.

It's midnight, the Tuesday before the crash. In the boys' bedroom, a street lamp shines in through a crack in the curtains, illuminating the clutter. in through a crack in the curtains, illuminating the clutter. A football, a cricket bat, toy planes, toy soldiers. And Ian's fallen into a deep sleep. He's fast asleep. Joan! Ian is sitting bolt upright in bed, his pyjamas are drenched in sweat. His father, John, hears the scream and rushes in to see what's wrong. Now, according to that front page story, Ian then tells his dad that he's dreamt about something terrible and tragic, a serious accident involving a member of the family.

And five days later, Joanna, Jacqueline and Tony are killed. Now, that 14-year-old boy, Ian, he'll grow up to be Lauren's uncle. And this whole premonition thing is all news to her. It's the first that she's ever heard of it. She reads the old clipping from the Daily Herald. He said it would happen only a few hundred yards from where my little girls died. God, that's mental. I mean, I don't know, Ian never mentioned that to us. That's awful, though.

But the premonition seems to be just a warm-up for what comes next. It's as if John is saying there's some bigger design at work here, something planned and predestined about all of this, that this is all God's will. Maybe John thinks the premonition is a sign. After all, he's been praying for years for evidence of reincarnation. Praying and praying and praying. Even though he knows it's wrong, and it's against teaching. But now, finally, he feels, no, he knows that something is happening. No, he knows that something is happening, and he's never been more sure of anything in all his life.

And that something is very, very significant. Something deep and profound, which will prove beyond all doubt that there are no endings. That while the human body might perish, and might perish in a horrible, tragic way, the essence of a human being lives on. Dr. Jeffrey Long of Elizabethtown College spends a lot of time thinking about this kind of thing. There's something that you could call the soul, the consciousness, the core of the person that persists after the body dies and that reassociates with another physical form. And this process has been going on for a very, very long time. Some will say it's been going on forever. And so John Pollock believes that the bodies of his two girls may be buried in the cold earth,

but their spirits are not gone. Far from it. They will return. And they will be as beautiful and vibrant in their next life as they were in the last. And though they never met, Lauren can relate to her grandfather on much of this. She's experienced loss in her life. Both of her parents have passed, so has her little sister Sophie. And Lauren feels that reincarnation isn't just possible, it's real. I definitely believe in life after death, yeah. I mean, I have to because I've lost so many people in my life, but I, yeah, I feel them around me all the time. Yeah, it makes me feel so much happier about loss. So Lauren's a believer.

But how do John's predictions go down in Hexham in the 50s? Well, even before all this, John is already regarded as a bit, well, strange. Pauline Todd remembers exactly what people thought of him. I think he was a very, he was a peculiar fellow. A peculiar fellow. And here's why. For starters, as we know, he's a Roman Catholic. I mean, Pauline's family is too. But John is a convert. He converted as an adult. And in the 1950s, in rural England, where the Protestant Church of England is the

heart and soul of every village, that is definitely a bit suspect. Then add reincarnation into the mix and whoa, now that is just deeply weird. And for Pauline's family, it's sort of the final straw. Well, that was it. I mean, we never had anything more to do with them. But maybe John saw it another way, another way entirely. Maybe he saw it this way. Maybe he saw himself as one of those figures you find in every great faith, in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam, a figure that does inspire suspicion, fear, even hatred.

Yes, maybe John saw himself as a prophet. Because John's doing exactly what prophets do. They deliver messages, divine messages, that people don't want to hear. They stir things up, they make trouble. And John knows precisely what happens to prophets. They're cast out into the wilderness. And that is just the start. Prophets are stoned, burned at the stake,

crucified. But John also knows something else about prophets. None of the suspicion, hostility, persecution. None of it means they're wrong. Prophets need people to hear their prophecies. but for now, John's struggling to find anyone who'll listen, even his own wife. And on the other side of the Atlantic, there's another man struggling to be heard. His name is Stevenson, Ian Stevenson. Now these two men will meet, you might even say it's their destiny to meet, But for now, they're strangers, an ocean apart. Two men crying out, each in their own wilderness. When we first meet him, Stevenson is in his office,

which is crammed with books, books on every surface. And he's hunched over his typewriter writing an academic paper. And he knows it's going to be controversial. Now, Stevenson doesn't exactly look the controversial type. He wears a suit, a pretty average suit, an old-school tie, sometimes maybe a bow tie and horn-rimmed spectacles. He seems trustworthy. He looks like quite a warm and friendly chap.

He sort of looks like Hugh Laurie in a way. So, OK, think Hugh Laurie. 38 year old Hugh Laurie, very polite with a wry sense of humour, twinkle in the eye, but also maybe kind of hard to read. Now Stevenson's a shrink and he's got a pretty good job at the University of Virginia, head of neurology and psychiatry, and he's super smart. When he's a kid he has a long period of illness, a lung condition, and that's when he starts reading. Just reading and reading and reading.

His illness encouraged his intellectual aspirations because he couldn't go outside and play football. He was quite frail. That's Professor Jesse Behring of the University of Otago in New Zealand. So he just found himself curled up with a book in the library in his parents' home and read ravenously. So as a kid, Stevenson's a nerd, a geek, or as we sometimes like to say in Britain, a boffin.

And guess what? Some of the books that he reads are books about reincarnation. His mum's books. But for now, it's just a passing interest. He doesn't really pursue it. When he grows up, he studies medicine. He becomes a psychiatrist. He gets a good reputation.

Until he does something a little outside the box. Yes, he returns to reincarnation. And now he gets into it in a really big way. And Stevenson does what he always does. He reads and reads and reads. He gets obsessed and he starts collecting stories of reincarnation from wherever he can find them. And then he goes public, writes a paper on the subject titled, The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of of former incarnations.

And he starts categorizing all those stories. The most interesting category of all, he says, is... Type 3. Which Stevenson describes as... Instances in which a person apparently recalled details about himself during a previous existence as another identified person. I am familiar with accounts of 44 such cases. And then Stevenson starts talking about some of his 44 examples,

including an eight-year-old Japanese kid who said that in a past life he died of smallpox. He gave details of his own burial and described the appearance of his former parents and their house. 16 items correctly matched with the verified facts. Then Stevenson talks about the three-year-old Indian girl who, in her past life, said she died shortly after childbirth. She recognized her parents from her past life. Whom she correctly identified out of a crowd of 50 persons and correctly called them by name. Then there was a six-year-old Belgian boy claiming that a portrait of his uncle, who had been killed in the First World War in 1915,

was a portrait of himself. On one occasion, when the kid heard a loud noise which sounded a bit like gunfire, he protested, saying, Don't! Don't! They killed me that way the last time! So, these are great stories. They're great stories. But they're just that.

Stories. Stevenson is after... more convincing evidence of human survival of physical death, a much more extensive and sympathetic study. And at first, Stevenson's sure it's not going to be him doing that study. But then, little by little, Stevenson changes his mind and decides that this is going to be his life's work. To come up with the strongest evidence yet of the reality of reincarnation. The only problem is, he knows this will be a hard road. He assumes that he's going to be trashed by his colleagues, by his

peers, and he's ready for that. But it turns out he isn't trashed, not publicly at least. No, it's far worse than that. For years, he was basically ignored. That's Jesse Behring again. He's writing a biography called The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson. So Stevenson's colleagues don't even engage with his work on reincarnation. They're just baffled. They, you know They shrug their shoulders or scratch their heads thinking, what the hell is he doing? Stevenson would love to be challenged in the pages of academic journals. That's the cut and thrust of intellectual life, right? But no, Stevenson's critics don't just snigger behind his back, but in front of his wife at cocktail parties.

People would make jokes at his expense when he wasn't there, so she would kind of feel the brunt of that antagonism. But Stevenson doesn't care, because if John is the prophet, a man of faith, Stevenson sees himself as a pioneer and a man of science, like Darwin and Galileo. And Stevenson knows that all the great men of science were ridiculed, shouted down, attacked. The criticism and the overt skepticism emboldened him. You know, it really kind of motivated him to prove them wrong. The only thing is, all of the cases that Stevenson has dug up so far are decades old. Stevenson needs something new, something fresh.

If he's going to be noticed and recognized and not just seen as a fruitcake or a fraud, he has to find his own case. Just one compelling case is all it will take. Then, he thinks, people will start listening. Hexham, Saturday, October the 4th, 1958. It's around 5am. Hexham General Hospital, the maternity unit. Series of single-storey wooden huts. The midwife on duty gets a call. Florence Pollock is in labour. The midwife picks up a medical bag, jumps in the car to the Pollocks' house.

For context, in the 50s, pretty much all births are home births. Now, the midwife knows all about John's predictions. All the midwives in Hexham do. Crazy, they think. There's no way Florence Pollock is having twins. I mean, all the observations confirmed it, right? Anyway, it's just a few minutes' drive to Lisa's Crescent, where the Pollocks live.

The front door opens. It's one of the boys. John's on his milk round. The midwife heads towards Florence's cries. John's on his milk round. The midwife heads towards Florence's cries. She's in the late stages of labour, so the midwife needs to move fast. She puts on an apron and gloves,

lays out the oil sheet on the bed and assembles her instruments. Forceps, scalpel, clamp for the umbilical cord. The midwife feels that Florence is four inches dilated. The contractions are coming fast now, so it's time to start pushing. Now, who knows, but we assume that when John went off on his milk round, Florence was already in labour. In those days, men didn't usually attend the births anyway, so maybe at that point John was probably thinking

this is strictly just for the women and, yeah, he would just leave it to them, so hence he went off and did his milk round instead. So John's out on his rounds and he must be aware that the moment of truth is approaching. After all his talk, his prophecies are about to be tested. If he's got it wrong, he's not a prophet at all. He's just an idiot, a crank, a lunatic. Oh, yeah, it's coming now. Anyway, back at. He's just an idiot, a crank, a lunatic.

Oh yeah, it's coming now. Anyway, back at Lise's crescent, Florence pushes and pushes and pushes. And the baby is born. A healthy little girl, chopped up. The midwife clamps the umbilical cord, cuts it with a scalpel and ties a knot. She then wraps the tiny newborn in a towel. She's about to hand the baby to Florence, but the contractions just don't stop. Florence is crying out. She can feel something. Something coming. The midwife has a quick look and guess what she can see? A head. Another baby is on the way. The midwife and

Florence look at each other, stunned. Yeah, twins. I mean, I guess at that point florence must have been totally flabbergasted because i mean remember she just thought john was talking rubbish about having twins but actually he was right everything that he prophesied was coming true the midwife keeps telling her one last push one last push and And then... That's it. Another child. A second child has arrived in the world. And it's a girl. Just as John always said it would be.

Now, the news reaches a friend before it reaches John, so that friend goes and finds John, who is still out delivering milk. And the story goes that the friend goes up to John and says, I have friend goes and finds John, who is still out delivering milk. And the story goes that the friend goes up to John and says, I have some good news for you. And straight away, John says, yes, I know, twins. I mean, that's crazy. John knows he's beaten the odds with his prediction, tall odds. But the birth of twins isn't the end of the story, far from it. The birth of twins alone, birth of twins isn't the end of the story. Far from it. The birth of twins alone, clearly, it's not evidence of much. No, John needs a lot more than that to prove his doubters wrong.

He needs a sign. So John delivers his last few pints of milk, goes back to Lise's crescent, and heads upstairs. I can imagine John being like, I told you, I told you this was going to happen. You know, this is, I knew it. And Florence just kind of probably staring in disbelief. John lights his pipe with a flourish, taking a series of satisfying puffs on the burning tobacco. He peers at the little babies.

And that's when he sees it. On one of the little girls, a birthmark. A birthmark above her left eye. And John starts smiling. Because that can only mean one thing. It's happened. Evidence. It's the evidence he's been praying for night after night after night, ever since he was a little boy. Get this. That birthmark on his newborn baby is in exactly the same place as a facial scar on one of his little girls who died in that terrible accident. Exactly the same spot. This is it, John thinks. What? I mean, that is just mad. That's just, how the heck do you explain that?

That's unbelievable. So John's certain. More certain than anything ever in his life. His girls have come back. Back to life. His two little girls who died aren't dead at all. They're alive. In fact, they couldn't be more alive.

They're breathing and crying and screaming right here in front of him. Reborn. Reincarnated. Living proof that life does not end. And in that moment, John Pollock makes a promise to himself. Even though he knows it will be hard. A trial. A cross to bear, he will convince the world.

You've been listening to Extrasensory, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House and hosted by me, Will Sharp. The producer is Poppy Damon. Extrasensory is written by Lawrence Grizzell. Additional production by Saren Jones. Original music by Daniel Lloyd-Evans, Louis Nank Manel and Toby Matimong. Sound design and mix engineering by Vulcan Kisseltug and Daniel Lloyd-Evans. Thank you. Research by Alan Sargent. Fact-checking by Jesse Bearing and Karen Walton. Our managing producer is Amika Shortino-Nolan. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye. The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is Lawrence Grizzell.